OBJECTIVE Undertreating pain and inappropriate use of opioids are potentially harmful to patients. We created a reliable process to discuss the pain plan preoperatively, hypothesizing that it will enhance the safety of opioid administration while improving the quality of pain management. METHODS A multidisciplinary group was convened for a 3-day workshop where a reliable method for preoperati...

We investigated the in vivo antimalarial activities of pefloxacin and ciprofloxacin in Swiss albino mice infected intravenously with 5 x 10(6) Plasmodium yoelii N67 parasites 1 h before treatment. Groups of 20 mice received a subcutaneous injection of 40, 80, or 160 mg of ciprofloxacin or pefloxacin per kg of body weight every 8 h for 3 days. Parasitologic activity was assessed on day 4, and su...

BACKGROUND Several evidences indicate that premature luteinization (PL) may affect IVF outcome. The primary end-point of the present study was to verify the effect of PL on the pregnancy rate (PR) of our oocyte-donation programme. METHODS PL was defined as serum progesterone > or = 1.2 ng/ml on the day of HCG. We analysed retrospectively 240 oocyte-donation cycles in which 120 women donated t...

The use of organophosphorous insecticides in agricultural environments and in urban settings has increased significantly. The aim of the present study was to analyze morphological alterations induced by malathion and 17β-estradiol (estrogen) in rat kidney tissues. There were four groups of animals: control, malathion, estrogen and combination of both substances. The animals were injected for fi...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to confirm the predictive cut-off values for P2Y12 reaction units (PRU) and aspirin reaction units (ARU) and to evaluate the clinical impact of VerifyNow® assays. SUBJECTS AND METHODS From November 2007 to October 2009, 186 eligible patients were prospectively recruited. Post-treatment platelet reactivity was measured by VerifyNow® assays wi...

The HPC2N Super Cluster is a truly self-made high-performance Linux cluster with 240 AMD processors in 120 dual nodes, interconnected with a high-bandwidth, low-latency SCI network. This contribution describes the hardware selected for the system, the work needed to build it, important software issues, and an extensive performance analysis. The performance is evaluated using a number of state-o...